CA and Bay Area will be fine, economically speaking, but at least from my perspective we've already reached a tipping point where it's become so expensive for your average family that it's created this strange, dystopian atmosphere (in SF) where you have obscene wealth next to in-your-face poverty, there are basically no kids because no one can afford to raise families here, streets downtown are lined with human feces and used needles, $1m gets you a small 1-bedroom fixer upper in a bad area, diversity (in profession/race/ages) is extremely limited, and people are generally stretched/anxious due to cost of living.
Obscene wealth next to in your face poverty is nothing new, nor particularly special about SF. I don't deny it's a big problem, but this is pretty much what every major city wrestles with. Nor is this unique to our time period. For example, it's well documented that in Paris through as early as the 1700's through now, that there was an enormous amount of capital concentration right beside extreme poverty and >40% of the population owning net nothing. 'Dystopian' is also a very dramatic language.. Where do you live in SF? If you live in downtown or soma and only spend time there, I can see what you mean. However if you go out to richmond or sunset for example, there are a lot more families and children there.
It's different in SF. The homeless are much more "in your face" than in any other city I've been to by a long shot e.g. in NYC the homeless mostly keep to themselves and aren't very aggressive in my experience. In SF they are very aggressive, many with mental issues, talking to themselves or yelling at others, and appear to be on drugs. I've never visited a city where they are so many homeless who are simply passed out in the middle of the sidewalk on the hard ground with people in suits stepping over them downtown. It's also more "visible" because services that cater to homeless are all located downtown.
I live in Castro, but obviously like many spend a lot of time downtown for work.
Sure, there are families in the outer neighborhoods, but it's different in the sense that those are mostly families that have lived in SF for generations. Good luck trying to raise a family as a newcomer on the reported median household income for SF of ~$78k.
Agreed - there are a lot of aggressive homeless people downtown, and in berkeley as well. Some guy was cussing me out and trying to pick a fight with me the other week when I was just walking along.
Definitely true, SF really is unlivable on a median income and that is a continual frustration I have.
> it's well documented that in Paris through as early as the 1700's through now, that there was an enormous amount of capital concentration right beside extreme poverty
1700s-present France is not what comes to mind when one says the words "stable and prosperous".
What does come to mind is executing a bunch of people then spending 150yr trying to figure out the best way to replace them.
> Obscene wealth next to in your face poverty is nothing new, nor particularly special about SF.
It is common in developing/third world nations. Income inequality is a hallmark of such nations. It would seem that the United States has dropped from a first world (creditor) nation to a third world (debtor) nation. It is a fairly recent phenomenon with very real and easily explainable reasons, which the article states numerous times over.
Any decent-sized US city has its share both wealth and poverty, but most are dominated by postwar development, so the two are separated by miles of freeway rather than feet of sidewalk.
Where inequality seems worse, you are probably seeing a successful progressive effort to prevent segregation, and vice versa. When your neighbors and everyone you encounter in daily life are all in roughly the same economic shape as you, that doesn't mean you're living in an egalitarian society. Quite the opposite.
You have triggered me, so I will rant a bit about the Fallacy of Equality of All Good Things.
Let me explain:
* Fallacy 1: First/third world = Creditor/Debtor
The financial hubs are always debtor countries, because the periphery wants to accumulate their reserves. So when England was the dominant financial power it always ran a trade deficit as everyone else wanted to acquire pound-denominated assets, which is a roundabout way of saying they wanted to be creditors to the UK. This allowed consumption goods from all over the world to flow into the UK while the rest of the world used the proceeds to acquire pound claims.
When the U.S took over, everyone started accumulating dollar assets, meaning they were creditors to the US. How did they achieve this magical feat? It's pretty easy, they just made their currencies a bit undervalued relative to the currency of the core. Nations can trash their own currencies pretty easily -- there is only a political downside, but if you can convince your countrymen to tighten their belts in exchange for being a creditor nation, then all the better, especially if you really need a reserve with which to buy foreign inputs. In other cases, they were not very democratic to begin with, so it wasn't an issue.
This is also true if you study local financial flows within a country -- a major urban area will be a debtor area and the poorer, smaller region around it will be a creditor to it, which is just another way of saying money flows out of the city and consumption goods flow into it from the land around. If you compare how much a person in a city consumes per day versus how much a person in the periphery consumes, we in the core consume quite a bit more. Restaurants, bars, custom shoes, concerts, museums -- we really live it up! How can money just flow out of a city without a printing press there? Because the periphery re-invests by purchasing assets in the core, recycling the money. So if you live in a farm or small town you will have a retirement account with stock or bonds that are claims on companies in the core -- the money you save is being sent back to the core rather than being invested in some other small town -- thus the periphery is a creditor to the core. This is true for cities as well as nations. This phenomena of net trade inflows to big cities was even true of Ancient Rome and Ancient Athens, but there it was pretty obvious that rather than having the farmers invest their money in Rome stocks, they were just taxed the loot was brought into Rome. The developed urban core is always a consumption sink while the more rural periphery tightens its belt.
This does not mean that the core is third world and the periphery is first world -- it means the opposite!
* Fallacy 2: strong currency = export power.
There is a similar fallacy with being an export power and having a "strong" currency. People like to have a "strong" currency -- e.g. who prefers weakness to strength? But people also like to be net exporters, because they want to make more income selling goods to others than they spend buying goods from others. But the stronger your currency, the more expensive your product and you become a net importer. Because assets in the core are somewhat overvalued relative to the periphery that the core is a net importer. You can see this by comparing interest rates in the periphery versus the core.
But you often hear people demanding both a strong currency and being an export power. And sometimes they throw in first world and net creditor to boot. Even though these good things are the opposites of each other. You have to pick and choose -- do you want to export a lot with an artificially weak currency, or import a lot with an artificially strong currency? Do you want to be a financial hub and thus a debtor or a smaller node orbiting the hub and thus a creditor? You can pick and choose what you want, but you can't have it all.
Here endeth my rant on the fallacy of Equality of All Good Things.
San Francisco is just...dystopian at this point. In-your-face poverty mingling with obscene wealth, human feces and used needles everywhere downtown/SoMa, decrepit 1 bedroom homes that sell for $1m, very few families/kids, and to make things worse stores that would be open til 10pm in any other city don't seem to stay open past 5-6 (at least in the Castro).
Edit: I thought it was weird for me as a single youngish male to "care" that there are kids and families in a city, but you're reminded when you go to basically any other city how much "realer" a city feels when you actually see families (moms, dads, kids, grandparents) walking around and enjoying each other's company and life in general.
It always makes me chuckle to see a work of fiction set in modern San Francisco that treats it like a normal city where normal people live. The NBC show “About a Boy” is a perfect example [0]. It’s hilarious to see just how out of touch most Americans are with what this city has become. San Francisco may have been an actual city in the past, but it’s just a filthy office park at this point.
A lot of SF feels the same as when I lived there in the 90's. I'm mostly familiar with the inner richmond and sunset areas. Most of the same restaurants and stores are still there.
Lyft can be profitable today if they wanted to. The only reason they aren't is because they are fueling growth by propping up the supply of drivers through driver signup bonuses.
Ride sharing is generally supply constrained (meaning there's plenty of demand but drivers are in limited supply). If they stopped paying driver bonuses to expand in new markets or maintain share of drivers in mature markets, then the number of drivers would likely start plateauing or declining (due to high turnover) -> prices would increase and/or rider wait times would increase -> rider demand would fall -> growth would stall.
In short, they're choosing growth over profitability because that's what investor want to see. As soon as they choose profitability (which they might have to after IPO), their growth will come to a halt and their share price will tank. Watch.
I took a look at some of Lyft's metrics [1,2,3], but would be interested in seeing a more nuanced breakdown of their expenditures. You mention driver signup bonuses are a major expense, and is "The only reason they aren't" profitable today. Is this a fact?
Wouldn't it be far more sustainable to just boost base rate with the money instead to reduce churn? It sounds like a perverse incentive of metrics to reward new drivers instead of total ones.
> Lyft can be profitable today if they wanted to. The only reason they aren't is because they are fueling growth by propping up the supply of drivers through driver signup bonuses.
Maybe, but subsidizing new drivers might be key to having enough drivers to satisfy rider demand. They're a commodity with very little stickiness, if Lyft has a wait people will use something else.
I think it's actually less labour supply constrained than most businesses, since it's a job almost anyone can do without training other than a driver's license. And there are no big discomfort factors compared to jobs like long haul trucking or working in a mine.
I'm on insurance, and to be very real I have gotten bills in the past from providers that I never ended up paying. The reality is that this is more common than not...providers only collect some small % of the part of the bill the patient (and not insurance company) is responsible for. They usually end up selling this debt for pennies on the dollar to collections agencies.
Do I feel guilty? Not really. But the lesson is that the number you see on some bill from a hospital or provider is not non-negotiable, and in general unlike the IRS they don't exactly have any power to garner your wages to collect.
If you find yourself in a position where you're getting some ridiculous bill, you should definitely hire a trusted lawyer to negotiate down a bill on your behalf.
1. Ignore all bills except the most persistent ones. Look at which ones are still being sent 3 months later.
2. Triage and sort the bills. Prioritize the ones that are related to the primary care facility where you were treated. Call them and negotiate to pay less.
3. Wait until 6 months and see if any bills are still coming. If they are, look at them again in order of priority, seeing if any of them are still reasonable and you have actually received the service/care.
After 12 months, if you haven't been receiving any care, toss any bills.
I had an outpatient procedure a few years ago and called to question the bill. It seemed like balance billing at the time and I straight-out said it to the office admin. Apparently that's all it takes, the thought of litigation and bad publicity? I haven't received another bill.
I wonder if Amazon will get into the wholesale game i.e. massive warehouse stores to compete with Costco and Sam's Club that you can get into with a (super) prime membership?
An impression I have of USian culture is that one is only “allowed” to spend time on pursuits such as essaying, the humanities, etc. without mockery after one has made a fortune
who can philosophize better about wealth than the people that became successful and wealthy? The other kind of social media philosophers is the Socialist type that were never successful but blame the system and everything else
Being successful does not make you uniquely qualified to assess how to be successful. In my experience most people will rationalize success stemming from their own superiority and minimize the role of luck and standing.
Or it could just be like Skinner's superstitious pigeons - it was mostly chance and now they attribute it to some series of events that really have nothing to do with it.
If one person rolls a die and gets a six and another person rolls the same die and gets a one the person who rolled the six will claim it was the way they rolled the die that led to their success.
> who can philosophize better about wealth than the people that became successful and wealthy? The other kind of social media philosophers is the Socialist type that were never successful but blame the system and everything else
Sociologist who studied average outcomes, successes and failures. Also, an independent person not personally invested in making oneself sound as awesome. Also, someone not having personal interest in changing how other people act for own benefit.
Obvious example: If 10 people takes same risk and 9 of them ends up super poor and 1 super rich, then the risk taking philosophy wrote by the 1 will be significantly different then the one that takes into account also those where risk part happened.
if luck does not explain 100% of the variance on average more successful people will have better skills than those who are not. It is a pretty big bias to think in terms of 1 or 10 or units
As someone who personally makes high seven figures and who's met dozens of people of 9, 10-figure net worth -- I think it's ridiculous that anyone thinks becoming phenomenally wealthy is not overwhelmingly determined by luck. None of the rich people I've met have any notable characteristics that explain their "success" -- although certainly, some have convinced themselves it was due to some quality of theirs that they could control (and not just that, for example, they were lucky to get into the right team, at the right firm, at the right time, etc.).
I assume people who believe wealth and success of individuals can be explained by predictable qualities or behaviors of that person have simply never met a rich person in their life.
how can you be sure that you and me are not biased since the definition of bias is to belong to the losing group? (you are upper quadrant for sure but still)
Better skills in one specific thing does not imply better skills in another thing. For example, ability to sell well does not imply ability to create accurate philosophy about what makes people end up rich vs poor. Different skill.
The reality is that Coinbase through their due diligence process had to have known about these ties and how they may have been perceived by the media/crypto community and yet proceeded to buy it anyway because they are desperate to list new tokens to shore up declining revenue.
The deal was already signed...Coinbase can't just back out because they miscalculated the backlash despite the background of the founders being well known. The acquired team probably just gets to vest immediately and leave Coinbase without having to work for them.
It is because they need some blockchain analytics provider (in-house or external) for every chain they list as a compliance prerequisite. Chainalysis/Elliptic only have a few available.
